


The Here and Now

by GalaxyOwl



Category: Ars Paradoxica (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, vague ramblings about time and geography
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-12
Updated: 2016-05-12
Packaged: 2018-06-07 23:31:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6829885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GalaxyOwl/pseuds/GalaxyOwl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A confused scientist wakes up on the deck of a ship 70 years in the past, and her life falls apart around her, and she picks up the pieces and moves on like nothing’s happened.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Here and Now

**Author's Note:**

> #FIRST (...I think?)
> 
> This is sort of short for me, but I wanted to write something for this podcast because it's gr9.

Sally Grissom enters the experiment chamber, disappears in a flash of light. In another reality, a confused scientist wakes up on the deck of a ship 70 years in the past. 

(But here, now—no one is sure how to respond. None of them are sure of what they saw, anyways. Three days later, someone files a missing persons report, and it sits on the desk at the police office for the next few months before being filed away as a dead end.

She has a few friends who worry, who mourn. Her coworkers do too. Her family. For the most part, the world moves on. The company hires a new lead physicist, continues the experiments. The paper runs a story on her mysterious disappearance that gets buried underneath the state’s latest sports win.

In one version of this story, a high school student writing a history report on the famous Dr. Grissom of the 1950s stumbles across this article and thinks the name a strange coincidence.)

A confused scientist wakes up on the deck of a ship 70 years in the past, and her life falls apart around her, and she picks up the pieces and moves on like nothing’s happened. 

The sea, the desert, the mountains. 

The sea is momentary. A place of transition, of turbulent, changing waters. Of confusion, more than anything. She meets a few people, learns the date, tries not to think about what all of this means for _her_ future.

She doesn’t want to go back. Sally thinks this to herself now over and over until she believes it. She doesn’t miss it—she misses individual things, sure, the comforts of technology, or the familiarity of her hometown—but she doesn’t miss that place, that time. Not really.

The worst part is when she believes it.

The desert is vast, sprawling, alive with potential and energy and excitement. She manages, slowly, uncertainly, to make friends. She makes leaps and bounds in science and there isn’t any situation—even this one—where that isn’t exciting.

The desert also holds death. It holds things that she wishes she could change, but even with a time machine there are _limits_ to how much one person can do. (In one version of this story, Sally Grissom dies in the desert, too, on Christmas Eve in a lightning storm that doesn’t fit with the imagery of sprawling brown emptiness and instead _demands_ attention for itself.)

The mountains are—something. They’re peaceful, quiet, the eye of the storm where everything is, for one moment, calm. 

She hasn’t been in a city with more than a thousand people in it since their trip to Vegas. But the mountain air is clean and clear and fresh, and she tells herself a million times that she can be happy here.

The locals whisper about her. _That strange Miss Grissom._ They’re never quite sure what to make of her, what to think. Don’t realize she’s a woman out of her time.

She learns to ignore it all. She always has.

Sometimes, she still wakes up in the morning and thinks it was all a dream. She never made a time machine, never wound up in the past, certainly never met the people that she has. She can never seem to decide whether it’s a nightmare or an adventure she never wants to let go of. 

Other times, she still wakes up and thinks it was all a dream. There is no 2016, and she hit her head when she tumbled onto the deck of that ship and none of her life before then was ever real in the first place. That’s not how that works, she knows; she doesn’t care.

Her memories are real. And she’s been right about everything so far, right? Desperately scrambling in the back of her mind to dredge up information from history class so she can remember what happens in this year, next year; each time she doesn’t know whether it’s more terrifying to be right or wrong. She tries to comfort herself with these thoughts. 

To be rational. 

Isn’t she supposed to be level-headed and mathematical? Don’t worry, Sally, just focus on logic and numbers, be the naive scientist who knows more about particle physics than how to interact with her neighbors.

Who is Sally Grissom, really? Because she’s not a woman out of her time anymore. But she’s also not just that quirky scientist with the answering machine on her phone. 

(In one version of this story, there’s a clear answer to this question. But I don’t think we’ll ever get that version.)


End file.
